Hearing-impaired Children Mandarin Plosive Pronunciation Experimental Analysis

Deaf children are those who have difficulties in hearing. The hard of hearing would affect development of their speech abilities. But now we have two techniques to help deaf children to hear sound again, that is hearing aid fitting and cochlear implant. After accepting the hearing aid fitting, children can take the rehabilitation to improve their oral speaking and make them return main-stream society early.The main purpose of this study was to understand the deaf children's speech characteristics based on acoustic analysis. We investigated two deaf children's acquisition of stops of standard Chinese ,and compared with the data of a normal hearing boy. The subjects were given the monosyllabic words and disyllabic words .All data was analyzed by Praat.There are three parts of our study:â…°Articulation error analysis.We found that the deaf children had three main types of the error : ecliptics, replace,. Expressed in the development of the vowel. They often put / / before the vowel /u/ ,put /i/ before /a/. For the consonants, there was highest confused between aspirate and non-aspirate. The deaf children usually replace the non-aspirate with the aspirate, take around 27%.So the aspirate is the handicap of the phonetics methods. The Velar stops was the second handicap for the deaf children.â…±Acoustic analysis.This part was a detail acoustic analysis of the stops .We collected following parameters, such as VOT , the length of consonants and vowels , the gap and the closure length, etc.VOT of stop consonants often serves as a significant acoustic correlate of, and perceptual cue to, category differences between voiced and voiceless, and aspirated and non-aspirated stop consonant categories( Abramson and Lisker,1970) .So measurement of voicing onset can also used in therapeutic applications for the deaf children.We got some conclusion:Firstly , the aspirated stop VOT pronounced by the deaf children was obviously shorter than the normal hearing children; but the non-aspirated stop VOT of the deaf children was longer than the normal .This reduced the difference of the aspirates and non-aspirates. Secondly, the deaf children pronounce better in the monosyllabic words than in the disyllabic words.Thirdly, the velar stop shows more burst in the deaf children phonetic charts than the normal hearing children.â…²Conclusion and discussionThis part we put forward some advices according to our experiment ,we hope this study can give some revelation in theory to deaf children healing education.â…°Respiration trainingâ…±Oral cavity trainingâ…²More communication and attention...